If you are committed to one of the popular ecommerce shopping cart platforms, such as Magento/PHP/Linux, or ASP.Net Storefront, we recommend you to keep your existing ecommerce website application. There are various options to integrate major shopping carts to such Corporate ERP application as Microsoft Dynamics GP. We would like to discuss them in this small paper. Before we go there, we would like to give you a suggestion, that maybe looking very attractive so-called turn-key ecommerce solutions might lead you to the complete abandoning of your prior investments in custom ecommerce programming. Plus there might be questions about how turn-key solution preserves your historical data: paid shopping carts, customers, items, historical promotional pricing, etc. Lets now move on to the paragraphs:
1.Custom shopping cart integration. This might be the best approach if you are large organization with high volume of ecommerce shopping cart transactions per day (lets say several thousand). If this is your case, please review the option to do eConnect SDK programming in MS Visual Studio to integrate your transactions with Dynamics GP Sales Order Processing Invoices and Sales Orders with Customer Deposits (in the form of Credit card payments, if you do not sell on account, otherwise you may send out customer statements in mail or email them in PDF format directly from Dynamics GP). If your ecommerce is on Linux platform, you can still try econnect, by calling its encrypted stored procedures via MySQL to MS SQL Server ODBC connection. We also saw successful Linux/PHP custom ecommerce shopping cart integration via Microsoft Dynamics GP Integration Manager, where on Dynamics GP SQL Server computer Windows scheduled job was set to fire the integration every twenty minutes (this was implemented on Dynamics GP version 10.0, and we believe that Integration Manager is a way more faster on Dynamics GP 2010, where more eConnect connectors were introduced for IM). Also, if you are on non-Microsoft platform with your ecommerce shopping cart, such as Oracle, DBII, Btrieve, we recommend you to consider simplified version of eConnect, which is Alba Spectrum Order Connector, where the set of SQL Stored Procedures is really small and it is not too complex to call few of them with just several parameters
2.Ecommerce products. Each product has to make a compromise on keeping your legacy ecommerce web application and switch part of its business logic to the ecommerce product. eCommerce products for Microsoft Dynamics GP or virtually any other ERP or MRP application are really good, when you are starting from the ground zero (just got venture capital, where decision makers ordered your company to launch ecommerce presence). However, for the rest of us, and this is typically the most common situation, we already have at least several years of existing ecommerce shopping cart application in production. Having said that, lets still give the products a try
3.Ecommerce Add-On for Dynamics GP, designed as a connector. Lets assume that we are integrating Magento Shopping Carts into Great Plains Sales Transactions. Here, we need to know what is our default ecommerce warehouse (inventory site in GP terminology). Second question is what is our ecommerce invoice document type ID in GP SOP module. Next question is – do we require automatic inventory allocation per SOP line, or we would like to delay allocation and do it on the warehouse floor via laser barcode scanning (Warehouse Management System). These are some of the dilemmas in designing ecommerce add-on product for Dynamics GP. In Alba Spectrum we believe that we found balanced solution, where you can integrate your existing web site and shopping cart in wizard driven manner
4.Another good words paragraph on Great Plains Integration Manager in shopping cart integration scenarios. Integration Manager validates business logic and doesnt allow you to compromise data integrity. This might sound like a bit abstract and philosophical statement, but it is real if you already have experience in recovering and fixing Corporate ERP data directly in SQL tables (for Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Great Plains Dynamics on Pervasive SQL/Btrieve or Ctree). In our opinion the most dangerous decision is to use direct SQL data feeding (via Insert statements in SQL Stored Procedures). Again Integration Manager could be scheduled to run every X minutes and this means it is compliant to ecommerce shopping cart quasi real time integration standards
5.Dynamics GP ecommerce on the international market. If you work for multinational corporation, where Dynamics GP is implemented in its headquarters, it is generally good idea to expand the same Corporate ERP application to foreign subsidiaries, especially in such global regional markets as China, Japan, Brazil, Russia, India, Europe, Australia , South Africa, Latin America. However this is not that simple. Microsoft Dynamics is available Worldwide, but in some countries you may have Great Plains, in other Axapta (plus Navision, especially in Europe or in historical trend, plus of course Solomon, however we didnt see large number of booth, in proportion comparable to GP and AX on Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta)
6.eCommerce and Great Plains Dynamics historical versions. Our recommendation is to upgrade to at least Dynamics GP 10.0. eConnect and most of the ecommerce add-ons for Great Plains are not compatible with Pervasive SQL 2000 and Ctree database platforms
7.To request support call, please call us 1-866-528-0577, We need to discuss your cards in order to recommend you the best solutions, which is not contingent to our preferences. We serve you USA/Canada nationwide via remote support (web sessions and phone/skype conferences). Local service is available in Western Michigan, Chicagoland, Southern California (LA, Orange County, San Diego), Houston area of the state of Texas
